In April 2025, the Trump administration sent a long letter to Harvard University. Among a torrent of accusations and demands one entreaty caught my eye: an independent audit of the university’s student body, faculty, staff and leadership for diversity of political viewpoints, or “viewpoint diversity” for short. This is not a new idea for Donald Trump –  a tweet from early in his first term read “If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view - NO FEDERAL FUNDS?” But in his second term, the criticism has been extended to more and more schools.

The administration’s accusations raise fundamental questions for everyone concerned with the future of higher education. What exactly is viewpoint diversity? Is there really a serious lack of viewpoint diversity on campus? Assuming the issue is worth addressing, what strategies could help cultivate it?

The Case for Viewpoint Diversity

Diversity can, of course, vary along many dimensions – age, cultural background, gender identification, income level and many more. A statement from the Center for Teaching Innovation at Cornell makes the case broadly enough to apply to any of these:

Students who hold different views benefit from seeing those ideas addressed and considered in class, enabling them to critically consider their perspectives and positions. … Learning to engage divergent views – in critical, effective and empathic ways – is central to the democratic practice itself, and to the University’s distinct contribution to civic and democratic health.

Jonathan Racster, a faculty member in the School of General Education at Purdue Global, puts it this way:

Ultimately, diversity directly improves the learning process. For professors, it improves how we deliver information because we have to think about what we're saying to make sure it is translatable to all audiences. This gives us a chance to reflect on what we're saying, giving us an opportunity for a new perspective. It also creates space for conversation, expansion of knowledge and understanding.

While these comments take a broad view of diversity, the White House campaign focuses more narrowly on diversity of political viewpoint. Speaking to that concern, Tyler VanderWeele, professor of  epidemiology at Harvard, has this to say:

Ideological or political homogeneity often just inhibits the pursuit of truth, sometimes causing entire areas of inquiry to be neglected. This hinders universities’ missions of generating, preserving and transmitting knowledge, and preparing students for democratic citizenship. … As John Stuart Mill argued in “On Liberty,” ignoring alternative viewpoints compromises our capacity to pursue truth, to understand other perspectives, to realize when we are wrong and even to adequately defend our positions when right.

Finally, a climate of viewpoint diversity makes it possible to freely express one’s opinions, even when they differ from those of other students or faculty. Writing for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Sean Stevens quotes Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren who wrote that “scholarship cannot flourish in an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust,” and warned the country that “teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise our civilization will stagnate and die.”

Unfortunately, survey results suggest that the conditions needed for free discussion of ideas do not always prevail on American campuses. No wonder, then, that many observers express concern. As Ted Mitchell, president of the nonpartisan American Council on Education puts it, “Viewpoint diversity is always at risk in every discipline and it really comes home when departments become homogenous around any set of ideas.” To evaluate the severity of the risk, let’s look at diversity from two perspectives: diversity within institutions and diversity among them.

Diversity Within 

Most recent commentary on political viewpoint diversity has focused on intra-institutional diversity. More than one critic has pointed to a 2023 survey by the Harvard Crimson finding that 77 percent of that school’s faculty identified as liberal or very liberal, compared with 3 percent who identified as conservative or very conservative. But that may be misleading. James Hankins, a conservative Harvard history professor, acknowledges that many of his fellow faculty identified as leftist activists as students. However, he sees most of his colleagues now as “serious scholars and scientists who just want to get on with their work.”

Going back a few years, the most comprehensive study of viewpoint diversity supports the existence of a strong, moderate middle on campus. In “The Social and Political Views of American Professors,” published in 2007, Neil Gross of Harvard and Solon Simmons of George Mason University looked at diversity in schools from community colleges to the Ivy League. They found that 9 percent of faculty self-identified as “extremely liberal” and 35 percent as “liberal” compared with just 1 percent who saw themselves as “extremely conservative” and 8 percent as “conservative.” But that left nearly half of all faculty in the categories “slightly liberal” to “moderate” to “slightly conservative,” all of whom, the authors thought, should be considered functionally moderate.

One point that bothers me in all such surveys is the use of a two-dimensional scale that labels leftists as “liberals” and rightists as “conservatives.” That leaves no obvious place for those who identify as libertarians or classical liberals. (“Classical liberal” broadly describes thinkers in the tradition of John Locke, Adam Smith, and Friedrich Hayek, who see individual freedom, limited government, and the rule of law as essential to good government, while shying away from the dogmatic attitudes of some libertarians.) On issues such as civil rights and criminal justice reform, both libertarians and classical liberals frequently align with campus leftists. But on other issues, like property rights and free markets, they skew right.

For philosophical reasons, libertarians and classical liberals are often loath to be pigeon-holed as “conservatives.” When the surveys offer no suitable box for them to check, reported results are likely to lump them together with apolitical “moderates.” Yet, in my experience, they are well represented on American campuses and make distinctive contributions to viewpoint diversity.

Diversity Among 

There is no reason to expect, or to want, viewpoint diversity within every social institution; diversity among institutions is often enough. Religious organizations are an obvious example. Among secular institutions, consider public policy think tanks. There are a wide variety of these, each with a distinctive viewpoint, such as the Center for American Progress (progressive), American Enterprise Institute (conservative), and Cato Institute (libertarian). Anyone who wants a variety of viewpoints on an issue can look at research across the political spectrum. 

Diversity among institutions is also important in higher education. However strong the case for viewpoint diversity, it seems entirely defensible on grounds of free speech and free association for schools to market themselves to applicants who might prefer a campus environment that is politically homogeneous. The question then becomes one of whether the existing supply of institutions adequately reflects market demand. If not, it could be difficult for strongly conservative or strongly liberal students to find the kind of higher education they want.

One way to answer those questions is to compare colleges’ political orientations with their acceptance rates. We would expect a functional shortage of conservative institutions to show up as low acceptance rates that would drive frustrated conservatives into colleges that were more liberal than they would prefer. However, the opposite seems to be the case.

The scatter plot shows acceptance rates and viewpoint rankings for some of the most liberal and most conservative U.S. colleges. The horizontal axis represents the school rankings, with 1 being the most conservative or most liberal. The vertical axis represents acceptance rates, with higher scores meaning it is easier to get into the school. The solid points in the figure represent the 25 most liberal and most conservative colleges according to a ranking by niche.com, based on political self-identifications of a sample of students. The hollow points represent the 10 most liberal and most conservative colleges as ranked by Accredited Schools on Line, based on a wider variety of factors such as gender and ethnic diversity of the student body.

There is a wide scatter within both liberal (blue) and conservative (red) groupings and no statistically significant correlation between ranking and acceptance rate within either group. However, the average acceptance rate is significantly higher for conservative schools (75 percent)  than for liberal schools (53 percent). The degree of intra-school diversity seems adequate to supply the demands of both liberal and conservative students who prefer campuses with homogeneous political viewpoints.

Overall, then, it appears that students do have a wide variety of schools to choose from, including some that are unabashedly skewed conservative or progressive in their orientation. Students who seek a conservative campus atmosphere should have little difficulty finding a school that will admit them. However, if we read low acceptance rates as a mark of higher quality (which many do), it does appear that conservative students who want to study at a top school may have to put up with a higher percentage of progressive classmates and professors than they want.

That said, there is still the administration (and large numbers of sympathizers from left and right) who are pressing for change. How can schools that seek greater intra-institutional diversity of political viewpoints best achieve it? 

How Not to Achieve Diversity

Start with two strategies unlikely to get us there. Top-down measures such as threats to conduct audits or to rescind federal funding are one of them. Harvard has rightly challenged the administration’s efforts as violations of the school’s First Amendment rights and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. At this writing, Harvard’s case has not advanced beyond preliminary hearing. However, the very fact that it has been filed, together with signs of coordinated resistance with other schools, reduce the likelihood that the administration’s heavy-handed approach will succeed.

A second questionable strategy is to conflate diversity of identity with political diversity. Yes, women, people of color and people who are gender-nonconforming may well have distinctive viewpoints that can stimulate campus discourse. The risk, however, is that the tools used to encourage identity diversity may narrow the range of diversity in political viewpoint.

For example, many institutions require faculty applicants to submit statements affirming their commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. Some schools advise that a “strong” statement should include an acknowledgement of privilege from applicants who are not members of a recognized “minoritized” group, or a pledge to “decenter” privileged voices while “amplifying” marginalized voices in teaching and research. 

The problem is, there is also a wide spectrum of viewpoints regarding the meaning of DEI and the proper ways of achieving it. At one end of that spectrum is colorblindness, which the writer Coleman Hughes defines as “the idea that we should treat people without regard to race, both in our personal lives and in our public policy.” At the other end is antiracism, in scholar Ibram X. Kendi’s words, “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.”

Advice from DEI coaches for faculty applicants to “decenter” voices that are “privileged” and “amplify” those that are “minoritized” convey the impression that not all positions along the colorblind-to-antiracist spectrum are legitimate. It is not surprising, then, that some aspiring conservative, libertarian or classical-liberal faculty would feel unwelcome, leaving schools that most aggressively seek identity diversity with inadequate diversity of political viewpoint.

More Constructive Approaches

A more promising way than coercion or ostracism that caught my eye comes from John McHugh, a philosopher at Denison University. He writes that a narrow focus gets the nature of the college classroom wrong by making it harder to address the very problem that viewpoint diversity is supposed to solve. He sees the job in a college classroom as one of “figuring stuff out together,” not debating the various dogmas that students may have held beforehand.

McHugh urges a focus on curiosity, pursued in an atmosphere where students set aside the views they brought with them when they entered the classroom. A well-structured debate may result in dogmatists who respect one another, which is all well and good. But curiosity can lead people to understand one another, which is even better.

A different concern is how to protect schools from political pressure to skew their viewpoint spectrum in a way that suits the government of the day, whether that means purging “woke” faculty or barring those unwilling to conform to the DEI fashion of the moment. Some conservatives and libertarians argue that shielding schools from political pressure may require forgoing federal funding altogether. James Hankins, the Harvard historian, reminds us that “he who pays the piper calls the tune.” And in an increasingly polarized political atmosphere, he points out, federal influence yo-yos school policy from one extreme to the other.

Under the Obama administration, Hankins notes, “the university’s sprawling DEI apparatus created, without faculty input, the pressure to regulate speech, require trigger warnings and enforce preferred pronouns.” Now Trump is mandating an even sharper turn, this time to the right. Hankins strongly supports Harvard President Alan Garber, who is pushing back by “reaffirming a culture of free inquiry, viewpoint diversity and academic exploration,” and by promising to continue focusing on “individuals and their unique characteristics rather than their race.”

Libertarians Jeffrey Miron (Harvard) and Jacob Winter (Cato) agree. They predict, however, that “any remedy would take time, though, and it would not replace all the lost funding.” Some programs would have to shrink.

Geoff Kabaservice at the Niskanen Center sees other problems, more structural than financial, as a cause of deficient political diversity. He notes that his alma mater Yale has more administrators than undergraduates and two and a half administrators for each member of the teaching faculty. Kabaservice agrees with Hankins that cutting back on a DEI bureaucracy that has overemphasized diversity of identity would be a good first step in promoting broader diversity of political viewpoint. 

A Way Forward

So where do we end up? First, there is a strong case that diversity of viewpoints improves the atmosphere for learning. Second, concerns about lack of diversity are often not groundless but are easy to exaggerate. To claim that American colleges and universities are “dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics,” as President Trump does, is unhelpful (as well as wrong). 

Many schools, including some of the most prominent, do skew to the left. But there is a strong core of faculty and students who just want to get on with the business of education. Students with conservative, libertarian or classical-liberal leanings can find sympathetic mentors on most campuses if they look for them, or can choose to attend the many schools that cater to their preferences.

In the end, neither ukases from the White House nor pressure tactics by DEI administrators are likely to have an enduring impact on campus political diversity. Neither is it likely that creating separate centers for conservative scholarship on otherwise liberal campuses, as Harvard has discussed doing, would accomplish the desired result. In the end, the most important need is widespread support from faculty and students for free and open enquiry, so that curiosity can flourish.